19 November 2024
The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and University College London (UCL) have launched a new phase of their strategic partnership to expand innovative work together in healthcare.
The two institutions have signed a ‘Letter of Intent’ to facilitate closer collaboration with IISc’s forthcoming Postgraduate Medical School across research, education, innovation and commercialisation.
The letter, signed at the IISc campus on Monday, 18 November, will underpin a new and exciting phase for UCL and IISc’s partnership as the universities seek to co-create significant new research capability together in areas across basic and clinical sciences, applied engineering and clinical practice.
Prof Govindan Rangarajan, Director, IISc, said: “We are delighted to build on our collaborations with UCL to carry out cutting-edge research in new and emerging areas. UCL and IISc’s joint efforts will also empower education and innovation in medical research and healthcare, which ties in with our efforts to build world-class post-graduate programmes at our upcoming medical school.”
Dr Michael Spence, President & Provost, UCL, added: “UCL shares IISc’s commitment to empowering and bringing together researchers from across disciplines to solve today’s most pressing challenges. This next phase of our partnership will create significant new joint research capability in healthcare focused AI, quantum tech and robotics, and develop educational collaborations to train the physicians of the future.”
UCL and IISc will create a joint working group to explore several potential collaborative initiatives across future-focused interdisciplinary areas such as digital health, quantum tech, AI and medicine.
The partners hope that the framework will lead to new programmes, leveraged together through external funding, such as collaborative PhDs, sharing health systems best practices, faculty exchange and research fellowships.
UCL has a long history of collaboration with India. Sir William Ramsay, UCL Professor of Inorganic Chemistry between 1887 and 1913, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1904. In 1900, he visited India on a trip sponsored by Jamsetji Tata to consult on the formation of IISc in Bengaluru. Ramsay conducted extensive research and the resulting report was instrumental to the choice of location for IISc. His co-worker, Prof Morris William Travers FRS, and then Sir Alfred Gibbs Bourne, both UCL alumni, went on to become IISc’s first and second directors.
This latest development strengthens UCL’s longstanding partnership with IISc, consolidated through a recent joint funding scheme that has supported academics from both institutions to collaborate in the fields of equitable urban design, liver tissue engineering and quantum technologies.
CONTACT:
IISc Office of Communications | news@iisc.ac.in
Sophie Vinter, UCL Media Relations| Ph: +44 7717 532 978, Email: s.vinter@ucl.ac.uk
